


I Am

by SaddlesoapOpera



Category: Warframe
Genre: POV First Person, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-23
Updated: 2019-03-23
Packaged: 2019-11-28 18:00:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,240
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18211691
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SaddlesoapOpera/pseuds/SaddlesoapOpera
Summary: A short, experimental trip through the mindset of a Warframe protagonist experiencing a series of changes in identity. Spoilers for the Warframe metaplot abound, be warned.





	I Am

I am Gersemi.

My battlecries make the bulkheads hum as I throw myself into the shielded troops, tearing apart their flickering protection with claws of pure Void essence. The instant their shields fail, it’s over. Their armour shreds like paper at my touch, and their bodies rend quicker still. Red rain sizzles against force-fields and paints the ringing walls.

Meanwhile, the Void swallows their counterattacks. Charged batons, energy blasts, explosions, all meaningless noise. Some dim, distant, rational portion of my mind keeps count of the extermination. The body count. Nineteen. Twenty-five. Forty-nine. The Lotus told me there are sixty-six living souls on the ship. She told me to leave none standing. The Lotus is the closest thing to a mother I know. For her, anything.

The last soldier, now short one leg, crawls toward a fallen comrade and reaches out to squeeze a button on the corpse’s glove as I bear down on him. A backpack generator whines and glows. A watery warble sets the air ablaze, and the rippling field hits me like hard vacuum. Icy cold rips away my contact with the Void. My senses dull. My claws disappear. And then, the superpositional lock on the wounds of sixty-six fights collapses. Shocks and impacts, slashes and burns — punishment beyond imagining scours my vivid blue-green shell. I kneel. I fall. Time passes. An airlock hisses. Semi-conscious, struggling to breathe, I feel a rifle barrel press against the back of my head. I hear a rough, throaty voice bark orders. I hear myself called a _specimen_.

Everything goes black.

 

 

• • • • •

I am Valkyr.

Gersemi is dead and defiled. A man driven purely by greed and ego is grafting her flayed shell to a mindless abomination. Only Valkyr remains. My steel-hard muscle is laid bare, exposed to the air, punctured through with restraining bolts and wrapped with binding cables. My eyes no longer close. My face is a broken death mask, pinned to the slab with an alloy collar.

The man gloats about his own genius, about the perfection of the plagiarized proxy wearing my skin. His rumbling chatter and deep chuckles hurt worse than the flaying. The entire universe boils down into my burning desire to rip him limb from limb. My reserves are drained, all my energy focused on staying alive through my tortures. But my rage is a wellspring. My agony, my fury, reopens a channel to the Void. Metal creaks and groans. Lights flicker. And my claws burn brighter than the sun.

I fight his men. I fight his monster. I scream my torment at them. Void resonance fills them with echoes of my sensations. It cripples the men. I pause to finish them, one at a time. Every single one. The monster ignores my pain, however. It is merely a puppet, and the mad genius feels nothing bathed by my howls. My pain amuses him. He laughs. When his abomination collapses in a heap of burning slag, he stops laughing. When I come for him, he stops smiling. When my claws find him, he starts screaming.

Him, I leave alive. Savaged and broken among the dead, next to the ruins of his prized creation. I leave him helpless, and one claw neatly punctures the reactor core’s coolant cylinder on my way to extraction. Klaxons wail as the temperature begins to rise. Perhaps, if he can master his pain as I have, he can reach the controls before the core melts down. If so, it will be a good lesson.

If not, it will be justice.

 

 

• • • • •

I am Maya.

Valkyr sits lifeless on the glossy floor. She is just a puppet, like the madman’s masterpiece. Fitting, since he is the one who helped me find this place. He learned his lesson well, it seems.

I sit cradled in a pod, my true body trembling and thin from long disuse. Valkyr's pain, her rage, none of it was mine. Just a dream. I am remembering, now. The vast colony ship. The jump. What came after.

I am so small, so frail I can’t even stand. My thin limbs feel like lead weights. Lua’s weak gravity feels crushing. But the Void courses within me, stronger than ever. Power I’d only known through the filter of my puppet. My Warframe. The Void energizes me enough to move. I crawl toward my old, familiar body. Struggling to recapture the feeling of connection. Trying to remember the dream. Valkyr's power. Her fury. I touch her, and let my energies flow between us.

I look down and see myself: a sprawling, emaciated wretch. I look up and see myself: a skinless, raging horror. I carry myself. I protect myself. I cannot stay here any longer. The enemy has found us. The Void burns within me. I unleash it, and it shatters their unbreakable bodies beyond repair.

I carry my fragile, true body in my strong, false arms, and stand on a broken golden balcony to stare in awe at the splendour of Earthrise as the Liset swoops down to save both of me.

Together, with two bodies, unsure whether I am both or neither, I fight off a remnant of the old empire warped by the old enemy and reclaim my ship. Singular once more, with Valkyr inoperable after giving so much to protect me, I meet the Lotus face to face for the first time. I feel her gentleness and warmth. I remember everything.

 

 

• • • • •

I am alone.

The Lotus has gone, to return to her own kind. Seemingly seduced away by an old lover of the woman she’d aspired to replace, she has betrayed him as well. Never Margulis, no longer the Lotus, now she is only Natah. I don’t regret the betrayed Orokin's suffering, at least. I'd already tried to kill him. He was a monster and he deserves his fate.

In a vision of his torment, though, he offers me a gift. The diagrams and concepts burn in my mind, as clear as any blueprint. It is a weapon. A means to end this conflict.

To make the dream real, I tell my only remaining companion, the Cephalon Ordis, how to work the ship’s foundry in new and ancient ways. I join with others of my kind for the first time, in hunting the mad, mountain-sized fragments of a fallen enemy war-machine so I can pluck out the parts I require. I melt a trove of priceless Orokin technology in a nano-forge to gather alloys no one living knows how to formulate.

When the process is complete I look down with grim pride at the gleaming blade I’ve created. A tool of vengeance, sharp as grief. It is too large for Maya to even lift, but Valkyr prefers her claws. I become a newer thing with an older soul to wield it.

This flesh was reassembled in the course of my journeys. He is the only Warframe with pain to match Valkyr’s. His anguished memories weigh heavily on my mind, but the sword is light as a feather in his hands. I practice with it until it feels lighter still, adjusting its balance and edge with still more Orokin wonder-works. With this sword, the _Paracesis_ , I will cut a swath through the old enemy. It will pierce their defenses as though they do not exist, and destroy them completely. I will fight my way to Natah, to the Lotus, and demand answers.

I am Umbra.

And I am coming for her.


End file.
